wadadadad

100% interviews are about communication and demonstrating thought process; after going through some rounds of interviewing candidates myself, any candidate who can adequately explain what they're thinking and how they arrive at their conclusions will be able to demonstrate their skills much more thoroughly than 'just use Postgres'.

That being said, it's also on the ones giving the interviews to push the candidates and ensure that they really are receiving the applicants best. The interviewers don't want to miss potentially great candidates (interviews are hard and nerve-wracking, and engineers aren't known for their social performance), and thus sometimes need to help nudge the candidates in the right direction.

Interesting that here ChatGPT was able to generally get the correct idea! Two points:

The answer is not specifically 'soccer ball', but just ball. I don't think that I would deem that as acceptable, though certainly it's very close! Maybe others would disagree, haha, and as I stated above, I do think riddles are open to interpretation.

Second, as to why my own prompting didn't get- I didn't specify 'identify the object'. I wonder if prompting that it wasn't necessarily a physical thing was helpful enough to get it significantly closer (still funny that the first answer I received was 'escape room').

As to GP: - in sports with balls, there is 'chaos'. I was aiming more from the audience. In some of the larger arenas of professional sports, there's a complete ruckus on certain actions. - The shape is moot; there's many different kinds of 'balls'. Compare football to soccer to tennis. - Balls all have an objective, a goal, usually to get the ball to a specific location ('goal' in the typical sense, but the vagueness could imply general use as well). This was mostly to imply a sense of purpose and use of the riddle's answer.

Again, not saying this is the best riddle ever, just trying to make a point.

I don't think riddles are necessarily 'solvable' in that there's only one right answer; the very fact that they're open to interpretation, but when you get the 'right' answer it (hopefully) makes sense. So if an AI/LLM can answer such a nebulous thing correctly- that's more of the angle I was going at.

Regarding the wizards example, I'm a bit confused; I was thinking that the best way to judge answers for problem solving/creativity was for correctness. I'll think more on whether the 'thought process' counts in and of itself.

The answer to my riddle is 'ball'.

This is an interesting idea, but as you stated, it's all logic; it's hard to come up with an idea where you don't have to explain concepts yet still is dissimilar enough to be in the training.

In your second example with the wizards- did you notice that it failed to follow the rules? Step 3, the witch was summoned by the wizard. I'm curious as to why you didn't comment either way on this.

On a related note, instead of puzzles, what about presenting riddles? I would argue that riddles are creative, pulling bits and pieces of meaning from words to create an answer. If AI can solve riddles not seen before, would that count as creative and not solving problems in their dataset?

Here's one I created and presented (the first incorrect answer I got was Escape Room; I gave it 10 attempts and it didn't get the answer I was thinking of):

---

Solve the riddle:

Chaos erupts around

The shape moot

The goal is key

When the top 5% makes 3x more than the bottom 50%? The top 5% makes 38% of the total, while the top 1% alone makes 22%, per the same sources you just quoted. Yes, the ones who make the most can afford to pay the most in taxes.

You didn't even cover GP's main point about getting the top to even pay taxes; the top 1%, per your own source, only pays 26%, while the top 50% pays 16%.

Top x% tax bracket should at least be 32%, per current brackets. So one could argue they aren't even paying what they 'should'. https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brac...

I onboarded a junior (not an intern though) as an otherwise solo engineer, and there definitely is something different about both being able to explain to them in such as way that they start to understand, and also watching them grow. I find it fulfilling, something that I don't think can be replicated with AI (and also good for everyone in sharing experience). Maybe it helps that the junior is very interested in the job and growing.

That being said, there's also a lot of time in teaching and explaining that isn't directly pushing work forward, so there's that to consider.

Out of curiosity, what references were you looking at for the setup?

I want to say that the game play was really well done, I really enjoyed the progression (speed of enemies, number of enemies, how quickly they descended) and mechanics (being able to shoot their bullets!)! I don't recall exactly how the original invaders worked, so I'm not sure how much was copied vs changed, but I very much enjoyed this as a brief break. Thank you!

This deviated from the original topic, and I'm not following your metaphor flows. How does your post relate to consultants specifically? Is there an implication that consultants not part of the 'mess'?

You say "No automatic force... whether (the agencies) are achieving any progress)". Don't we have oversight agencies and committees? I'm not following your 'grow and grow'; can you provide evidence that all agencies just 'grow and grow' without achieving progress? If not all agencies, then be specific.

Also, what evidence is there of "stuff" that is "irrational, corrupt, and not serving the mission"? Which mission? What corruption? What evidence of this? Can you speak more specifically here?

Please provide evidence to claims so we can have an discussion around this.

I'm not sure I'm following what you mean by 'social roles'. Which roles are you referring to here?

I'll disagree that it's not at least individual malicious choice, though. Someone decided that they needed to fake/change user agents (as one example), and implemented it. Most likely it was more than one person- some manager(s)/teams probably also either suggested or agreed to this choice.

I would like to think at some point in this decision making process, someone would have considered 'is it ethical to change user agents to get around bans? Is it ethical to ignore robots.txt?' and decided not to proceed, but apparently that's not happening here...

I appreciate your attempt to clarify here, but your citation link above in 2) is for 'trangender', a misspelling (but it does search successfully).

This isn't a 'search problem'; searching for 'gender' and 'transgender' always and immediately redirects back to the main page. I also tested several unrelated searches without any issues (HIV, genome, public, potato).

On this topic, the problem I have with "talk less" as advice is that although simply by 'talking less' you make room for silence and other people to fill it in, it doesn't actively instigate other people to talk. I want other people to pro-actively give their opinions and thoughts.

Thank you for providing the link for this- it's greatly interesting to see how such a failure could occur through human means and the significant impact it had, and how it can directly relate to academia (really, many topics, anywhere there is a '$SYSTEM').

The cover ups in the article were also interesting- a deliberate staging to Mao to prevent uncovering the truth. I'm not sure how this compares directly (is there a centralized authority with power to fix the issue that is being lied to, compared to the decentralized "rotten" system, where the status quo is understood and 'accepted').

I don't understand what you're trying to say here. To share my experience as someone who volunteers, I find it to be one of the most gratifying (humbling, helpful, makes me see the value of life) things, and I think it's worthwhile to share the idea that it could help someone who is searching for meaning. I wholeheartedly recommend volunteering for everyone who can afford it (which I recognize not everyone can). I'm not sure GP here needs to necessarily state "I volunteer and found it worthwhile" every time they recommend it.

What are these "obvious reasons" that volunteering won't help someone seeking direction?

I also don't follow why you haven't stated whether you've personally tried volunteering and whether it's "worked" for you, particularly when you seem dismissive of it and seem to looking for personal reasoning from others.

Thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it! It definitely seems automated schema updating is necessary if you're doing more than a couple of databases, and you raised many other good points that I hadn't fully considered. I can definitely appreciate larger clients wanting their own dedicated databases, so planning for that initially could be a wise choice. Thank you again!

How is this working for you so far? Do you ever need to report across the multiple tenants, and how do database migrations go? I'm starting to look into this, and purely for reporting and database migrations I'm leaning towards multi-tenant.

How do we know when a site is Dutch? Maybe check the URL to see if the TLD indicates?

I'm in agreement with showing/inputting dates in the users' regional setting.

I really like the word conviction here for this concept and this use is new to me; has this been used before? A casual search for me doesn't term up anything.

Will you please provide some additional context here as to why and how Duolingo is poor at language acquisition? What software is better at language acquisition?

If the child is creating games because the act of creating games is fun, it's fine- great even! Same thing for painting, or playing basketball, etc.

The point I think GP was trying to make is, if the child is creating games because they want to share the games and they think other people will enjoy the games they created- that's where the problem is. GP is saying that kids can get disheartened because their expectation was others will enjoy their game, when potentially (very likely), others won't enjoy their game, because game design is hard. Adults may be more able to handle this emotionally and 'push through it', but children could potentially take this poorly and not want to continue game development because of the negative reactions of others.

We should absolutely continue to encourage game design (or really anything a child is interested in); I would say generally we should be aware of this potential concern for anyone developing games.

I'm curious, can you tell us what the negative impacts you've seen are? Are there any audits that you can say are a positive indicator for security?

Awesome, I really appreciate your time and the references. Thank you!

I don't think I was communicating my first point effectively; I didn't mean to reference you personally or to the approach taken (VPS or cloud). If there is a business who needs HIPAA, then most likely, the business should be doing all of those original points because doing them is better (more effective, better security, etc.) than not doing them. I'm trying to say than extending to HIPAA could potentially be 'simple' if there is a business already doing most of this.

I understand that you're using Azure's existing infrastructure to handle your logistical technical management, but I was here asking if you had to make any changes to keep abreast of changing regulations. There seems to be practical business decisions that need to be made that HIPAA impacts, such as what data constitutes PHI (has that changed? Maybe you had to go back and change what data you were keeping because of the above regulation changes- I don't know if that could be the case, that's why I'm asking, I'm not aware of what I don't know). If Azure is somehow keeping track of all "changing regulations" for you (including business needs) and you've never had to worry about it, that's good to know. I would still be interested in any specific details if you're aware of it.

secure sensitive information in a database, secure your hosting, maintain security updates to those hosts, undergo audits, keep up with changing regulations, keep up with the latest threat vulnerabilities, staff a full response team in case something happens

To be fair of the things you've described, if you can swing it, you should be doing most of this regardless for a business setup. Specific to HIPAA would be the auditing and 'changing regulations' (and depending on client needs, you'll likely have other audits for business needs).

I'm going through a gap analysis for HIPAA now; would you mind sharing what impactful changing regulations you've seen in the past 5 years?

I think there's a difference between being 'content' and being 'happy', where happy would lead to a smile, and content is more of a general satisfaction that may not lead to a smile. I would argue that being content is the minimum here rather than necessarily having the smile (but certainly a smile is much stronger and more noticeable of a sign); and that there are many more people who are content going to work than those who go with a smile.

I'm curious as to how you're defining 'conventional software engineering' here; can you give some examples of things that are not conventional software engineering in the front end?

This could work (perhaps on a more weekly level for me). I would have to note the solutions and problems as I come across them and put them into a backlog, otherwise I'll definitely forget about them (until I run into them again, haha).

This does go back to topic focus though. Regarding programming specifically, I generally will have a topic (such as a feature enhancement). If I implement a new solution to a problem, it's not clear-cut to me if I should go and implement that solution everywhere relevant during the current topic, or if I should wait until a more tech-debt rework to clean things up a bit. My inclination is to focus on rework only during those tech-debt reducing stints. I really should figure out a clear and well-defined process for this.

I've been considering the topic of solving problems too early for quite some time now, and you very effectively communicated this point; thank you for that clear insight.

Relatedly and at the same time, I sometimes have a hard time figuring out when the right time to 'solve' the problem is. Speaking generally, if left unchecked for too long, it seems like more effort to go through and find instances of the problem and create a valid solution and then apply the solution, then if I am able to spot the reoccurring problem after only a few instances. This is particularly worse when I go back and solve the problem in a few areas, but there are more areas that I've missed (and now I have some spots with the solution, some without, and everything is messy). I suppose I need to spend more time after creating a solution to see if it's applicable apply anywhere else (but then that's more time refactoring than actually working on the problem at hand).

Would you consider yourself as to have "chased the new shiny"? If you don't mind, how many changes (overhauls?) would you say you've made?

I spent a couple of minutes looking over the link you provided. Here's my honest feedback.

- I wasn't able to immediately understand what the point of the application from your description (both here and on the site itself). If I can't understand it immediately, it's unlikely I'm going to use it. Eventually I was able to understand (as best I could, I'm still not sure) that it's for sending other people a link to your profile, so you can show them a list of other websites related to you (with a description).

- The audience would have to be users with: more than one link they want to send (otherwise they would just communicate their own link directly); relatively low tech skills (or else they might just build their own website with similar functionality that they have complete control of); and people who feel a repository of links and descriptions to send to other people would be beneficial. This seems to me a very specific audience that I'm not sure is large enough to merit solving a problem for (if your goal is a sustainable company).

- I'm not sure of the cost-benefit of your application to the end users. I'm not the audience of your application, but this doesn't strike me as something I would use if I was in your target audience.

- What's your end goal? To make money, as you're asking about pricing structures? Then it's unlikely a dollar or a pay-what-you-can model is going to get you far. Users won't directly financially benefit from your service, so I don't see users thinking "I should pay that application back for the benefit it provides".

- Personally, the website is visually unappealing, which detracts from my hypothetical willingness to use it. I don't like the straight black background, and the content doesn't flow well on my desktop browser.

I hope this was helpful to you.